The last time Laurie Terlick found himself on a skateboard was 38 years ago. Back then he was a devil-may-care teenager living in the small city of Albany, Western Australia. Terlick and his mates would skate barefoot on home-made boards, wearing just-below-the-bum stubbies, T-shirts optional. They would come home to dinner tables sporting red raw knees and elbows – as the maxim goes, “if you don’t fall off you’re not trying hard enough”.

The 55-year-old has returned to his hometown for a 40th anniversary celebration of the city’s famed skate track, the Snake Run. He’s already had a few days of getting reacquainted with the infamoustrack. “I started down there and slowly worked my way up,” he says, pointing to the bottom of the 140m concrete track. From here at the top it is a dramatic and frightening looking drop.

In between Terlick’s cautiously paced runs, other (considerably younger) skaters carve up the track, all streaming long hair and loose limbs. Wearing helmets is compulsory today, a decree handed down by the festival’s insurance company and only Terlick, dressed in a long-sleeved shirt, trousers, with elbow and kneepads and a helmet strapped tight, seems happy to be head-to-toe in armour. “I notice mostly these kids haven’t got much gear on – it’s only the old buggers that are into self-preservation!”

Was he nervous about getting back on the track? “I was terrified. Hence the gear.”

Laurie Terlick returns to the skate track he helped design and build in 1976. Photograph: James Whineray/Perth international arts festival

The Snake Run is Australia’s oldest purpose-built skate park still in operation and it’s believed to be the second oldest in the world. In 1976, Terlick was one of a group of kids who, with council support, raised funds to build the park, designed it and even pitched in to help construction. Last Saturday’s celebration of the park’s 40th year, organised by the Perth international arts festival, saw some of those kids from Albany – many of whom are now granddads – reunited with American skate champion Russ Howell, who helped open the park.

At 15, Terlick had already left school and was working as an apprentice glazier. When he wasn’t working he was surfing and when he wasn’t surfing he was skateboarding – which was merely “surfing on the land” as Terlick calls it, except “you don’t get wet and there’s no sharks here”.

Before the Snake Run opened, kids would skate on the roads and were quickly becoming a public nuisance, weaving in and out of Saturday morning shoppers and tottering grannies, the cars on York Street screeching to a halt. The sound of wheels squealing on the footpath was as loud as a jet taking off. Occasionally they skated on the slants of the high school car park and Terlick chortles as he recalls one memorable evening when a nude model was being drawn by art students in the library. “We were all peeking through the windows!”

A group of students – guided by Jim Macaulay, the father of two students, Graham and Steve, but like a second father to many of the boys – began to push the council for a dedicated park to be built. “Old Jim Macaulay, the late great Jim Macaulay who lived up here somewhere,” says Terlick, pointing at a row of houses. “Jim passed away, sadly. Would have been good to see him here today.”

They set about raising funds, selling raffle tickets for $1 a pop, with the main prize a brand new colour television. Macaulay Sr kitted out a second-hand caravan and began selling fairy floss, cold cordial and helium balloons at community events. Together they raised $3,000 and the council, so impressed with their initiative, fronted the remaining $10,000. They were granted land use of an old quarry where kids already mucked about, playing with tadpoles in the ponds and riding their pushbikes over the bumps.

None of the kids had been to a skate park before – Albany was and largely is still a remote dot on the south-westernmost point of Australia – and, in those pre-internet days, it was difficult to know what one should look like. The 17-year-old president of the project committee, Tony Johansen, now 57, says the naiveté with which the project steamed ahead was a sign of another time. “You could never do it today, there’s no way in the world. This was raw. We had nothing, we’d never seen a skate park.”

So the kids took cues from their other great love, surfing. In essence, they created a concrete wave – a wave that, unlike those rolling in a couple of kilometres away at the bottom of Mount Clarence, would remain unchanged by seasons and tides. They followed the natural topography of the land, turning natural dips into the contours of the track and bending it around granite boulders. (At the anniversary presentation the Noongar elder Carol Pettersen noted the Snake Run follows the footprints of a mythical snake called Wargal, who thousands of years ago created the hills, valleys and waterways of the land.) Contractors were brought in for the month or so of construction work but the kids were there every step of the way – pegging out the track skeleton, clearing out the dirt.

Concrete being laid down on the Snake Run in 1976. Photograph: City of Albany

The final stage involved waiting for the wet concrete to set – an instant magnet for local louts. So the boys decided to camp at the site overnight, armed with a carton of beer, to keep watch and fend off any potential vandals. Covered in mosquito bites at four in the morning, Johansen’s friend Charlie Parer put his board down on the edge of the half pipe, gingerly skating from one side to the other – it held, just. “Yup, that’s pretty good,” he declared.

Having conceded defeat to the unrelenting mossie army, the teen security guards went home. By the time they returned, around lunchtime, the park was crawling with kids. “There were boards going everywhere, skin coming off kids, screaming mothers chasing children,” Johansen says.

The park had its official opening in February 1976 and it felt like half the town had turned up for it. A 26-year-oldAmerican pro skater, Russ Howell, had been invited to attend. He was a compact, muscle-bound man with a shock of white-gold hair and brought a very different, more acrobatic style of skating to the town. His signature move was riding upside down in a handstand and by doing so on launch day immediately wrote himself into Snake Run folklore – who knows how many miles of young skin have been scraped away since in failed attempts to replicate the move.

But the kids of Albany didn’t really belong to Howell’s school of skating. They wanted to skate like they surfed – with gliding dips and ascensions; lift and flow. Style was everything. The fact that the Snake Run lined the slope of Mount Clarence gave it “pure energy”, Johansen says. Across the other side of the world a similar evolution was taking place in California where a major drought saw skaters like the Z-Boys (immortalised in the 2005 film Lords of Dogtown) take advantage of empty backyard swimming pools. They, too, borrowed from their love of surfing, crouching low on their boards and looping high off steep pool walls. It broke from the upright, flat ground skate style of the 60s and arguably revived a sport in decline.

Johansen gives an emphatic “no” when I ask if he will skate today. “Been there done that.” His bones don’t reset as well as they used to and, like most of the old-time boys of Alby (with the exception of Terlick), he prefers to watch from the safety of the grassy knoll. “You have time to be young and you have time to be old,” he says.

With Johansen is his wife, Jill, 55, who also lost a lot of skin on the track. There were only a handful of girls that skated back then, although she says it was her crush on a boy from school that got led her to the Snake Run. “I was after Tony more than anything,” she says. “He was spending so much time down here I thought I might as well take up skating as well.” Jodie Cooper, Johansen’s friend, ­also skated although it was in surfing that she eventually made her mark, becoming an Australian surf champion and Lori Petty’s body double in the 1991 movie Point Break.

Johansen’s parents didn’t approve of her skating (“It wasn’t the thing that girls did back in those days,” she says) so, to save up the $80 required for a set of wheels, she found a part-time job at her father’s fish factory.

Johansen snorts when I praise her dedication; her nose wrinkles at the memory of weekends spent filleting Nannygai and going to school smelling of fish. “Yuk! It was horrible.” After two months of hard yakka she had earned enough to buy her first board: a yellow thin deck with wheels in a matching yellow. Other would make their own boards by nicking the wheels off a sibling’s roller-skates, cutting the deck out of marine ply and then decorating it with a Hawaiian T-shirt before it was finished with fibreglass and aggregate.

In the intervening decades since the establishment of the Snake Run, skate parks have sprung up all across the world – but few can claim the continuous history of the Albany track. According to the West Australian heritage minister, Albert Jacob, of the nearly 500 skate parks built around the world during the 1970s only 30 still exist today. Albany’s relative isolation has acted as a buffer from the rising real estate prices that have sent so many other parks into the jaws of developer bulldozers – but still there’s been a couple of close calls, particularly in the early 2000s when land value rocketed. A state heritage listing announced last Friday will help protect the site in years to come.

In their documentary on the park, the film-makers Matt and Tim Zafir interview a number of Australian and international pro skateboarders about the park’s importance. A local skater, Leith Scot, says it would be “devastating” to lose the track. “It’s where I grew up skating, it’s where dad grew up skating and it’d be great to see my kids grow up skating here.”

Plenty of professional skateboarders continue to make pilgrimages to Albany for the Snake Run, a five-hour drive south of Perth. The Australian skate pro Rory Lucas describes the Snake Run as having a “shitload of character” and, for Morgan Campbell, there’s something “kind of spiritual” about skating something that’s been around that long: “You don’t take someone who wants the perfect ramp there; you take someone who’s down for an experience.”

Like a piece of vintage furniture, the imperfections of the track have become part of its charm. It continues to send even the best skaters in the world flying and skidding across its alligator skin (a surface that has only become more coarse with time), breaking bones, snapping tendons and ripping open palms. “To this day, I’m convinced that that concrete is harder than normal concrete,” Campbell says.

At the 40th anniversary celebration, the Snake Run has been given a slick new coat of paint, with a gun-metal grey snake flicking out its tongue. An open tricks event showcases the “gnarliest” ollies, grinds and flips that competitors can muster. A spunky young local skater, Austin “Aussie” Taylor, walks away with a pocketful of cash, ending the competition with a show-stopping air that lands to the cheers of a 2,000-strong crowd on their feet. Howell is also back in Albany, handstands and all, and at 66 is the oldest skater to take on the Snake Run.

Skating alongside veterans of the game is eight-year-old “grommet” (baby skater) Isi Campbell, from the nearby town of Denmark. By the afternoon her face is a blotchy, tear-stained mess – she’s upset because she wants to get back on the track but festival organisers have ended the skate portion of the day. She’s been skating for almost three years and, absent from any skate lineage, essentially taught herself. Like any skater worth their salt she’s already sponsored, by local skate brand Soggybones.

Beneath her pink helmet, Campbell’s tears quickly evaporate as she races through my questions with monosyllabic replies and a shy smile: how was it riding the Snake Run? “Fun.” Was it fast? “Yes.” Did you fall over? “No.”

The Soggybones skater Isi Campbell, of Denmark. Photograph: James Whineray/Perth international arts festival

By 7pm the sun begins to dip behind the horizon and the day’s formalities come to a close. Hundreds of kids come rushing onto the track, like water flooding a parched riverbed.

Jill Johansen had recommended I walk the track barefoot to understand how lumps and knicks naked to the human eye are like molehills turned into mountains when you’re deathwobbling your way down the track on a set of homemade clunkers. So I slip my shoes off and feel the unforgiving prickle of the concrete underfoot. I try to read the bumps and lumps with my toes like it’s braille. I think of how young those men of Albany once were, how with such guileless optimism they turned the Snake Run into a reality, but also how, when they turned 17 and got their car licenses, the skating chapter of their lives began to close. Suddenly there were girls, and beer, and an entire new world of surf spots that had opened up.

But new skaters continue to take on the deathly descent of the Snake Run, and here was another generation of kids that all day had been held back from the track because of the organised demonstrations, now whooping and hollering on it with chaotic joy. A security guard tries, largely unsuccessfully, to stop some of the kids who have their boards out.

Sure the Snake Run has turned 40, but it remains young at heart.

Russ Howell is in conversation with artist and skater Shaun Gladwell for Perth international arts festival’s Art & Motion at Astor Theatre on 16 February